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Out of touch with touchy-feely times
After the death of Diana, Princess of Wales there was a shocked and uneasy sense across the country of enormous change. At first it was difficult to describe, let alone understand; gradually it became clear that a major shift in sensibility had taken place, causing some new sort of geological divide between British responses. There was something of the same feeling about the election; it has been called a landslide, and so it was, but not in the usual sense.
The result wasn't a Labour landslide, whatever Labour might like to claim; in an astonishingly low turnout, only 24 per cent of the electorate voted for Labour. That was rebuke, not a mandate. The result could instead be seen as a Conservative landslide, but only in the sense that the force of their defeat has tipped the Tories almost off the map, to flounder in the disputed Channel; supported by only 18 per cent of the electorate, they have only one seat west of Bristol and few north of a line from the Bristol Channel to the Wash. But the election was also a landslide in the sense of a major cultural upheaval, reflecting a new political geography for Britain.
I came to see, during the election campaign, something I didn't understand before. It is not just that the Tories are hated sometimes, or that they are embarrassing sometimes, or even that they are unelectable. It is that they are beginning to seem irrelevant, for several reasons. The one usually offered is that Labour has stolen their clothes, and it's true that that is the central difficulty. But another important one, I think, is that to many of the young, and the young middle-aged, the Conservative Party has come to seem like a superannuated freak show. Sometimes you can see what they mean.
I do not enjoy thinking this or saying this; I feel great affinity with Tories, and great gratitude for the enormous achievements of the Thatcher revolution. But four weeks of listening and watching have convinced me that it's true. It has something to do with the Diana divide; the contemporary obsession with being in touch (or out of touch), especially with feelings, but also with mass culture and mass fashion, breeds tremendous prejudice against anyone or anything which is not touchy- feely-demotic, and cool, such as the average Tory candidate.
However much conservatives and fellow travellers like me may despise Tony Blair and his camp for the lip-trembling tendency, we have to admit that it showed a better understanding of the electorate. Voters seem to want to be talked to differently these days. Many Conservatives, both insensitive and resistant to change, seem to have astonishingly little idea of how they now appear to others or how narrow is the sector which can even tolerate them. How, for instance, could any intelligent Tory publicist have permitted the embarrassingly genteel voice-over on the feral schoolchildren broadcast? Was it a joke?
I don't like the politics of the trembling lip either. But as La Rochefoucauld said, a man who doesn't accept the conditions of life loses his soul; so, too, politicians who do not accept the conditions of life - which include change, and maybe rapid and unwelcome change - lose their seats and their raison d'etre.
However, a change in style will be the least of the challenges which confront the Tories. Much the worst is the political muddle at the heart of the party. In crude terms - and the crude terms of politics are always unfair, of course - the Conservatives have managed to appear both uncaring and interfering. A political party can cope with one or other of those accusations, but not with both at once, obviously enough; people might vote for uninterfering-but-uncaring, or caring-but-interfering, but, to offer uncaring-and-interfering is electoral suicide, as we have seen.
There has been endless debate since 1997 about the balance in the party between authoritarianism and libertarianism, between liberty and traditional values. It is indeed a difficult debate, and muddle still appears to prevail; hence the confusion in the election campaign and the disastrous " pounds 20 billion cuts" story, and the ordeal of Oliver Letwin. No one quite liked to speak up about tax, because no one quite dared or quite agreed.
The Conservative Party has failed so far to meet the challenge posed by New Labour to reinvent itself. It failed to be radical, or bold, presumably because it thought it had some hope of office. Now that it has none for four years, or maybe for eight if Mr Blair has any success with the public sector, freed of the albatross of Europe, Tories can at last think the unthinkable; as the Sixties song put it "Freedom's just another name for nothing left to lose". These coming years in the wilderness ought to be very invigorating for the Conservatives, if any stay to find out.
What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention. Admittedly it raises the obvious question of what happens to the unfortunate. What happens to compassion and community? Tony Blair talked of the Third Way, but that has proved to be an empty concept, just so much statist waffle. The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion. The voters think, wrongly, that Conservatives don't care about it. But actually they do, and have plenty of ideas about it. This is what the Tories should be questing for, in their wilderness. Then they might also find a new Jerusalem; they might again change the direction of British political thought. And feeling
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, June 09, 2001
